JSX does seem to fit that niche better than any other alternative I've tried. It pulls off a rather remarkable trick of avoiding the "uncanny valley" that you usually get from starting with a language and contorting it to do something different.
JSX manages to feel just about right: it's plain-old-HTML when you want it to be, and plain-old-Javascript when you need an out.
Still... I wouldn't mind writing in a truly standard language. You're "really" writing the DOM, and HTML and DOM are this godawful bastardization of a user-interface description language. I'd be slightly less grumpy to have a good DOM-writing library, and deal with its ugliness, rather than mix-and-match the domain-specific-language in with my actual coding language.
I'd written myself a good Java version of this type of thing, and I found it kinda pleasant -- especially since it let me do HTML structure checking via the Java type checking. Typescript is -- God help me -- actually a pretty good language, and I'd be OK with actually writing my user interface structure in it, with the help of a good library.
At least then I'm writing in only one language. That saves me time to go out and learn the godawful bodge of CSS to make it look pretty.
JSX manages to feel just about right: it's plain-old-HTML when you want it to be, and plain-old-Javascript when you need an out.
Still... I wouldn't mind writing in a truly standard language. You're "really" writing the DOM, and HTML and DOM are this godawful bastardization of a user-interface description language. I'd be slightly less grumpy to have a good DOM-writing library, and deal with its ugliness, rather than mix-and-match the domain-specific-language in with my actual coding language.
I'd written myself a good Java version of this type of thing, and I found it kinda pleasant -- especially since it let me do HTML structure checking via the Java type checking. Typescript is -- God help me -- actually a pretty good language, and I'd be OK with actually writing my user interface structure in it, with the help of a good library.
At least then I'm writing in only one language. That saves me time to go out and learn the godawful bodge of CSS to make it look pretty.